2010-09-29

Who the fuck?

Who was the bastard that designed the standard that controls how stuff you put into the usb port works? I mean, why in hell must it take an infinity of time for a memory stick/sd-card reader or whatever to be disconnected from the fucking computer? If I tell it to eject it should fucking disconnect immediately. I have no patience for that crap.  (I am a little annoyed since this mornings failed attempt to get the ethernet card in one of my computers to work (the non working ethernet card is the reason for the non existence of photos on this here blog recently)).

2010-09-19

Aaaah

We are, just for fun, listening to all our records - in the order in which they stand in the shelf.
Up until today the low point was the Chopin record that was a combination of music and letters (read in French) to and from the composer. Who bought that we really do not know (but since K has a great memory and mine is more the shape of a Swiss cheese I suppose it was me at some confused point in my life).
Today we came to Mazarin by Per Gessle. I can not even begin to describe how much I loath it. My god, I want to puncture my eardrums with a spoon. We and our stupid projects.

2010-09-15

Project

I decided during my stay at my parents house this summer that it would be a nice little project to scan all their old photos (or most of them anyway). Mostly it was so that I could get some photos of me when I was Tage's age for comparison, but why not do them all I thought. So I told my dad to bring them to me and now I have 25 cartridges with 40 slides each ( = 1000 slides) to process in my bookshelf. Scanning takes about a minute each so that could be done within 16.7 hours (if I really streamlined the operation) but that does not take into account the time it takes to remove dust, change frames on some of them etc etc etc. Then there is the post-production, cropping, making changes to the exposure, digitally remove some dust etc etc. But that is all fine, it is just manual labour and yes, it takes time and is kind of repetitive but I sort of like that.

What I do have a problem with however is sorting. I am kind of meticulous when it comes to my photos. I have them nicely sorted in the order in which they were shot. I like the time-line, that they form a record of events. It probably has to do with my poor memory. To have your photos sorted like that is of course not ideal. For one thing, it makes it impossible to put them into an album (if you don't put all of them in there), and you can't sort all your photos of your dog in one place (cause then you disturb the time-line), and you can't really show your photos to someone (because then you must show all of them)... (all of this applies to the analog photos of course, the digital ones is far easier to handle (I highly recommend using a photo managing/editing software like Lightroom, Aperture, blueMarine or picasa to keep your photos organized)). But as you might have guessed, the gene that makes you inclined to keep anal order among your photos must have skipped a generation. Photos of the X-mas 1981 pops up in numerous cartridges. Winter is mixed with summer, spring and autumn. A young version of my mother pops up in the middle of a moose hunt in 1985. Dogs that did not exist at the same time seems to be playing together. These cartridges must be my fathers version of Monica's closet. I feel that I must bring order to this chaos but I do not know how. 

2010-09-09

Schroms

This week me and Tage have spent more than an hour each day in the forest looking for mushrooms. Except for today we have gone to the smallish forest a couple of hundred meters from here. This one: (We live in the house under 'Earth')


View Larger Map

Since the forest is so close to the town, in fact it is in the town, it is a very popular recreational area. A lot of people move around there and even if not everyone looks for mushrooms I always see people who do just that, but even so, I have had no problem at all finding around 4 litres every day (Chanterelle, Funnel Chanterelle and Trumpet of death (cool name!) mostly). Today I thought I would change it up a bit and take a bike trip a bit further away, to go where not so many other people have gone before. Compared to just getting the stroller and going into the woods it was quite a bit harder. I am not very used to biking around with a little kid on the back of the bike, and getting on and off is a bit tricky... I also had to carry him almost everywhere we went. So, lets have a quick quiz: how much do you think I found today?

2010-09-06

In April

Some time in April or thereabout I borrowed two books at the local library on the art of using flashes whilst photographing. It was an active choice, I went to the library just for that cause. I have a good flash and I do not know really how to use it to get good results, instead I fool around and use the trial and error method (which works to some degree but - really, come on...). So I have actually meant to read, no, to really study these books.

Since then I have re-borrowed them three times, two of the times after the loan already had gone over the limit (so now I own the library some money), even if the library has sent me a mail a couple of days before saying that 'hey, its time to return/re-borrow the books'.

One of the books I have used as a lap-top stand when I have the computer in the bed. The other I actually opened and read several pages in, up to the section of the omni-bounce. It stated that - 'you really got to have an omni-box'. I do not have an omni-box. And yes I could buy one (and I will, once I am in a town that has a decent camera store), but since I do not have one I felt a little like a looser, I mean come on, I did not even realize when I bought the flash that I of course should have bought an omni-box too. Anyhow, after I had read the section of the 'must have' omni-box I kind of lost interest in the books  (no, not really lost interest, I have felt stupid, lazy and like a looser every time I have seen them) and they have just been laying around here since. Until yesterday when I returned them to the library after I had received an email from them saying 'please return the books now you dickwad, we both know it, you will never read them so why not let someone else get a chance? come on now, what do you say?'. This was several days ago, so now I own them even more money. Some times I mess these little things up for no bloody reason what so ever and let me tell you, It really sucks to do that.